(WWII veteran John Gillard next to a B-24 with a ball turrett gunner. Click for link to original webpage.)When I was in the 10th grade, we encountered a poem called The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner. It was in a heavy paperback anthology with very thin tissue paper pages that were always tearing, and there was a brief paragraph about World War II pilots and the American poet Randall Jarrell who had served in the War and how it had given him a great deal of writing material. We all read it, didn't understand it, then moved on. World War II was at that time something vague and past that our grandparents or older relatives talked about, and the men who'd fought never really confided what they'd been through unless it was privately to other men.
If you've been watching Ken Burns' The War on PBS and you saw the segment on the pilots who dropped bombs over France and Germany and fought in the air, The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner will make perfectly horrible sense. I don't know if they mentioned the poem during the show because I missed some of it and I am not living in the modern DVR world, but one of the veterans even noted how the ball turret area forced a soldier to be packed in with his knees up around his ears, in the belly of the plane, almost in a fetal position.
This same veteran interviewed said that they'd been fired on and the plane's pilot was killed, and he was in this strange ball turret section below bleeding for hours. His own blood froze because the temperature was minus 30 at such high altitude, and he wondered while floating in limbo like that whether he'd ever survive. His name was Earl Burke and as he was talking I remembered The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner from years ago and finally understood it. And maybe that's the function of a lot of poetry taught in high school -- to create a consciousness of something that you're not going to be able to fathom when you're 15, but it might just stay in your mental archives for however long it takes for someone else's words and your reality to intersect.
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell
